With one exception - the
poppy.
It perseveres where nothing
else can, and its
roots go deep.
In some places there are
fields of poppies,
dancing in the breeze as far as the eye can see.
It is a beautiful flower,
there to gladden the
hearts of those who see it.
But not your hearts, and
not in your hands.
When you look at the poppy,
you ignore the
beauty of its flower in favor of the sap of its
pod, a juice
so potent that in your hands
becomes the seed of destruction for weak men
at all ends of the earth.
Including your own.
The deadly opium and heroin
which it produces
have brought a dreadful death to so many, and unspeakable
anguish to so many more.
A destruction greater
than any war.
For some, the poppy is
a symbol of
remembrance;
For you a symbol of forgetfulness.
As with your faith, and
your land, you have
taken a thing of beauty and seen only ugliness
in it,
and have disseminated that ugliness far
and wide with a generosity not
known to you in
other things.
Perhaps your Afterworld
will be a vast field of
glorious poppies, but
with a perfume so strong
and a seed so powerful,
that with the first
breath it will make you soar so high that you
almost
touch the wings of Heaven, then
plummet you through and past the fires
of Hell,
into Oblivion.
Eternity is a circle.
It goes around, it comes
around.
It is Alpha and Omega.
But you may never find
it.
Let it be.
